Erotic Absence and Sacramental Hope: Rowan Williams on Augustinian Desire

By Jonathan Jameson, ’19

Both church and culture seem perplexed by desire and what it says about us as human beings. Amid the increasing freedom to identify with our desires, there remains the perpetual problem of insatiety, coupled with the increasing isolation of a digitalized age. Our cultural and religious impulses become blurred as we seek always a little more, in our hopes that we might finally quiet our ontological restlessness. Rowan Williams, drawing from Augustine, identifies this restlessness as central to understanding ourselves and our relation to God and others. This erotic absence that disallows any premature closure offers not satiety but sacrament, and a place in a body larger than our own.

In this essay, I will be exploring Rowan Williams’s theology of desire chiefly by examining his interpretation of Augustinian desire in Williams’s recent collection of essays On Augustine. As one reviewer noted, it can be hard at times to tell who is speaking in this collection—Augustine or Williams. In light of this, I will not seek to do extended surgical work on the text, neatly dividing up what is specifically Augustine or what is exclusively Williams. Instead, my intention is to identify from this collection, and a few supplementary texts of both Williams and Augustine, Williams’s distinct vison of desire and its relation to God. The vision that emerges here is in some ways quite severe in its honesty about the disordered nature of our desires and its insistence upon our ontological contingency, but it is nonetheless intensely beautiful in the way that it seeks to reorient those desires to right relationship with God and with one another. 

The understanding of desire that is developed, refined, and re-presented by Williams is born largely out of his patient and profound wrestling with Augustine’s thought. So, before we get to Williams’s interpretation of Augustine, it will help to get a basic, brief, understanding of which Augustine we are approaching and some basic tenets of the development of his ontology and theological anthropology. 

Which Augustine?

Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430) is without a doubt the most influential church father of late antiquity—his thinking is deeply embedded in Western thought and culture. The sheer timelessness and heartbreaking beauty of his genre-defying Confessions, with its intricate weaving of memoir, theology, and prayer, has made this ancient North African a beloved friend to many across time. Of course, with success and renown also comes the prospect of being cleverly dissected and reformulated to fit the tastes of whatever the spirit of the age might dictate, or else being condemned by it. There is also the issue of which historic “Augustinianisms” to attribute to the man himself and which to reject as corruptions, or at least recognize as accretions or exaggerations. 

Beloved Augustine is also often a beloved punching bag for whatever one may find distasteful in Western Christianity. A. N. Wilson offers a litany of some common allegations: 

[Augustine] is regarded as the macho father of Western Catholicism: obsessed by the evils of the flesh and all but dualistic in his depiction of a city of God that is completely at variance with what Wordsworth called “the world of all of us.” He is also seen as an ardent heresy-hunter, an establisher of Church orthodoxy and a male chauvinist who abandoned his common-law wife and child in order to pursue a career as the sex-hating, self-flagellating egomaniac. 

Another recent article in a popular periodical sought to explain “How St. Augustine Invented Sex,” or at least, according to the author, our current obsession and neuroses attached to the act. These “pop-culture” accusations are generally more concerned with an “enlightened” denouncement of what they see as seeds of repression in late antique theology than with any sort of thoughtful engagement with Augustine’s thought. While this is still a popular position on Augustine in certain camps, and there are indeed unresolved issues with the legacy of his theology, the shift in scholarship that has led to a reengagement of his primary texts and their dynamic vision of grace, beauty, and desire (a few of many revived Augustinian themes) has shown that an avoidance of Augustine’s thought is to one’s own theological impoverishment. 

As there are books, conferences, and scholarly journals dedicated to “Augustinian studies,” I will not here attempt to dive deeply into these complex and valuable discussions and reengagements other than by touching on how certain aspects might inform our understanding of Augustine’s view of desire and, more specifically, Williams’s interpretation of this. Williams’s collection of essays, On Augustine, that will guide this essay synthesize twenty-five years of research, meditation, teaching, and writing on the work, thought, and person of Augustine. Williams, the sometime Archbishop of Canterbury and current Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, has lived and led through a time of great and ongoing change in the church—change that in many ways reflects the shifts in wider culture. These shifts have been accompanied by the development of postmodern thought, which has been influential in the development of the “new look” on Augustine. The proponents of “Radical Orthodoxy” have in some ways sought to offer an Augustinian inversion of nihilism and modern discontent by emphasizing the primacy of divine revelation. According to the introduction of Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, at its core the movement is “a return to patristic and medieval roots, and especially an Augustinian vision of all knowledge as divine illumination—a notion which transcends the bastard dualisms of faith and reason, grace and nature.” While Williams’s approach is distinct from that of Radical Orthodoxy, we will explore how he too will counter this cultural tendency with Augustine’s thought. 

Despite the variance of foci and use, Williams notes, 

What has been intriguing to see is how Augustinian scholarship overall has moved in the last quarter of a century towards a fuller appreciation of Augustine as someone who reflects carefully on a central tension in the human condition—between the fact that we have to begin all our thinking and praying in full awareness of our limited, embodied condition and the fact that we are summoned by our creator to go beyond limited and specific desire, reaching out to an endless abundance of life. . . . [This shift] has made it harder to repeat the clichés about Augustine’s alleged responsibility for Western Christianity’s supposed obsession with the evils of bodily existence or sexuality, or its detachment from the world of public ethics, its authoritarian ecclesiastical systems, or its excessively philosophical understanding of God’s unity, or whatever else is seen as the root of all theological evil.

This essay will emphasize this “central tension in the human condition.” 

When it comes to the topic of desire, Augustine’s openness about the strangeness of life is refreshing in a culture that tends toward either naturalist reductionism or privatized interpretations. Williams writes, “He confronts and accepts the unpalatable truth that rationality is not the most common factor in human experience, that the human subject is a point in a vast structure of forces whose operation is tantalizingly obscure to reason. . . . The heart is moved, drawn, tossed about by impulse and desire, and ‘will’ has less to do with reason than passion.” This seems to echo the famous statement of another Augustinian, Blaise Pascal, who wrote, “The heart has its reasons of which the reason knows nothing.” As we will see later, Williams will show that it is only in relationship that this obscurity is seen to be more than postmodern discontent or individualized sentimentality. 

Augustine and the Fall

Augustine’s understanding of creation and the fall are deeply intertwined with his approach to theological anthropology, ontology, and desire. While Gregory of Nyssa and certain other Neoplatonic-influenced interpreters of the creation of humanity suggested a “de-sexed” or “angelic” state in the garden—with gendered difference only being introduced in (or on the way to) the fall—Augustine instead affirmed a fully physical and gendered, even sexual, existence in the garden. While it is possible that this is a conclusion that only became fully formed later in his thought, closer to the writing of his On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis and the defense of his sexual teaching in Against Julian, it is nonetheless also present in some form in Augustine’s earlier perspectives on embodied life and the disordered will.

This judgment on the gendered and sexual physicality of primal life left Augustine with a unique rejection of both Neoplatonic and Manichean dualisms in favor of a higher view of matter and the body. If our bodily sexuality was somehow sound in paradise, it, in turn, makes the acute effects of the fall on our bodily existence all the more tragic. This full-blooded anthropology supposes a form of ascetic discipline and repentance, but one that is markedly different from that of one who strives simply for an “angelic” life. Peter Brown writes, “In Adam and Eve’s first state, sexual desire was not absent, but it coincided perfectly with the conscious will: it would have introduced no disruptive element into the clear serenity of their marriage. Marriage, therefore, was an expression of the primal and enduring nature of men and women as ineradicably social beings, created by God for concord.” So, in Augustine’s thinking, sex was not a result of a fallen adoption of animal nature; instead, it had once perfectly adorned the “marriage” of Adam and Eve and been rightfully subjected to the will. But Augustine sees the immediate effects of the great disobedience in an image that isn’t often encountered in Sunday school or catechesis: Adam gets an involuntary erection. 

To the post-Freudian mind this suggestion is full of sexually charged fodder—sexual repression, frustration, guilt, confusion, and so on. But if we dig a little deeper, it is not sex, in itself, that is Augustine’s main concern here; it is the lack of control that we currently possess over our wills. Sexuality, for Augustine, is simply the arena in which he sees this demonstrated most clearly. Augustine writes, 

How significant is the fact that the eyes, and lips, and tongue, and hands, and feet, and the bending of back, and neck, and sides, are all placed within our power—to be applied to such operations as are suitable to them, when we have a body free from impediments and in a sound state of health; but when it must come to man’s great function of the procreation of children the members which were expressly created for this purpose will not obey the direction of the will, but lust has to be waited for to set these members in motion, as if it had legal right over them, and sometimes it refuses to act when the mind wills, while often it acts against its will! 

This divide in the will that reflects a lack of self-perception and proper orientation is what Augustine finds to be the ontological dilemma of the postfall life. The desires of our wills are perpetually frustrated not by lack of getting what we want, but by the fact that we have lost the ability to perceive and rightly act upon desire. Our ontological disorder is not a matter of “having some fun and breaking the rules,” but the sad fact that we, in ourselves, are unable to make sense of our disordered state. 

For Augustine, one must always remember, evil is simply the privatio boni, the privation of the good. So, despite the frequent charge of disparaging sex and the body, it is actually Augustine’s high regard for the good of creation that results in his focusing on their current disorder and what that might point toward. Evil, having no substance of its own, is like a parasite on the good, dragging it down toward incoherence. Augustine writes, “Accordingly, whatever things exist are good, and the evil into whose origins I was inquiring is not a substance, for if it were a substance, it would be good.” He later continues, “I inquired what wickedness is; and I did not find a substance but a perversity of the will twisted away from the highest substance, you O God, toward inferior things, rejecting its own inner life (Ecclus. 10: 10) and swelling with external matter.” Williams, reflecting on this section of the Confessions, explains, 

To see evil as a privation is to see it as something that affects my own perception of what is good for me: if evil is the absence of good it is precisely that misreading of the world which skews my desires; so that to read the world accurately (in its relation to God the creator) is also to repent. Furthermore, that accurate reading of the world arises from the renewal of my own creaturely relation to God, my own shift into a relation to God that truly represents what God is, and thus overcomes the evil which is constituted by imperfect, corrupt or nonsensical pictures of the divine.

So, contrary to a dualistic view of evil as a competing substance, a thing in itself, it is seen instead to be a parasitic disease that progressively unmakes us and obscures our vision of what is real and substantive, even in ourselves. Williams continues, “The point of view of a creature, considering itself in itself, is not a neutral locus standi, but is itself an illustration of what evil is; an account of the good of a creature abstracted from its place in the universe overall as ordered and loved by God.” It is here that we start getting an idea of where Augustine is taking us when it comes to desire. The discussion of evil here is not concerned with a puritanical chastisement of “bad acts” or an exhortation toward “good acts,” but more deeply it seeks to expose a disordered vision of ourselves and God, particularly in showing the irrational impossibility of a self-determining creaturely vision. Williams writes, “There is, in other words, a tight connection between the adoption of a particular ‘doctrine’ of evil and the reordering of our desire towards its proper end.” 

Desire and Absence in Williams’s Interpretation of Augustine

There have been many attempts to link Augustine’s discourse on the self—particularly in the Confessions—with a sort of proto-Cartesian “self-awareness.” But Williams’s reading complexifies this assertion by reminding us that Augustine doesn’t interpret the self as a “self-contained mental substance,” but as a “self always already related and thus imperfect and questing.” In this light, Williams invites us to look again at what Augustine finds as he “turns into himself.” 

Williams argues that what is distinctive about the Confessions is that Augustine refuses “to present a narrative that in any sense claims clarity or finality.” Augustine’s “self-awareness” is presented in what Williams calls a “drift of sequences,” writing, “If there is a narrative coherence to be sought, it is not in the narrator’s control.” This is not a biography that tells a tale of moral achievement or virtue, nor is it a lesson in repentance in any sort of prescriptive way. Instead, it presents the self as contingent, in conversation, at prayer. Williams writes, “The coherence is given by the divine listener/observer, the God who ‘reads’ what is being written; and if that is the case, what is written is not finally defined by what is available for human inspection and will naturally avoid attempts at final formulation. I am not there for myself but for God; I can’t make the links that make sense of my life.” 

Williams argues that the seeming incoherence of the narrative in the Confessions and its inclusion of what we might perceive as the “bizarre and ambiguous” guards against the temptation in the spiritual life toward a “premature closure.” Whether this manifests itself in a self-assured emphasis on “enlightened” mystical vision or a contented moralism, there is a temptation to see life as a measurable progress toward God, while only including the nice parts of our story. We might see this tendency reflected socially in the carefully curated and filtered lives of “influencers” and our own (just “human” enough) social media “presence.” Here, we are once again encouraged to present ourselves as a finished, “branded” product for consumption, in hopes that digital affirmation might offer meaning and cohesion to our lives. But for all its seeming glorification of the normal, it is only a curated and selective “normal” that avoids the bits that we don’t know what to do with. Finally, we are left anxiously grasping after more of the affirmation that supposedly articulates to us what is found to be socially “valuable” in us. To this, Williams writes, 

To know myself truthfully is to know a speaking subject trying, in word and imagination, to come to terms with absence—the absence of God as an object, the absence of final and satisfying objects in the light of the always locally absent but universally pervasive God, the absence of a finished self. I know myself as an act of questioning, a lack and a search, perpetually unsatisfied with this life, yet not frustrated. The self’s native climate comes to be seen as a sort of eros without the anxiety to possess.

This unsettling absence and our inclination to make it “go away” or to seek its satiety, whatever it takes, is familiar to the modern existential experience, particularly in our age of discontent and “fear of missing out” (or “FOMO”). And there are of course “secular” and “religious” ways of dealing with this “problem,” the average person making use of both in one way or another (a cultural tendency deemed “seculosity” by one theological observer). Whether it be through so-called secular pursuits—consumerism, workaholism, addiction, sex, relationships, social media, sports, politics, and so on—or, on the other hand, the temptation to treat religion and spirituality as the thing that finally abrogates our ontological desire, we are, in Williams’s words, hoping for a “premature closure” in ourselves. 

Augustine suggests that at the root of this confusion is a sort of category mistake. God is not an object among other objects competing for our love or attention. God is not the biggest or most important object, of whom we ought to give the special rank of priority. He is not the added “filler” of a “God-shaped hole,” an idea which has taken a frightening consumeristic turn since its supposed origin in Pascal’s thought. In some sense, God is the “God-shaped hole” itself. Augustine writes in De Trinitate that God is “good without quality, great without quantity, a creator though he lack nothing, ruling but from no position, sustaining all things without ‘having’ them, in his wholeness everywhere yet without place, eternal without time, making things that are changeable, without change of himself and without passion.” Augustine continues, “Therefore he who is God is the only unchangeable substance or essence, to whom certainly being itself, whence comes the name of essence, most especially and most truly belongs.” This Being is not an existential “fire extinguisher” or an embellishment on, or completion of, an already “full” life. Instead, in encountering God we encounter a truth that exposes our own being as contingent on another sort of Being. 

Williams, following this line, writes, “The knowledge of the truth is always a knowledge of our incompletion; thus we cannot know God as a simple desired object that satisfies us. The openness to God’s reality implied in any openness to truth entails an openness to hear what we are not prepared to hear, what challenges our own account of what we desire.” In light of this, we might be able to reconceive our desire. Instead of God being the one who “fills” us, Williams suggests that “God is, at the very least, the unsettling absence that will pervade sensual pleasure, the meaning that is not said or embodied in any of the meanings of the material world.” This Augustinian “restlessness,” this perpetually frustrated desire, is reconfigured here as a reminder of God’s presence—an abiding, and sometimes disturbing, presence that disallows any finality in lesser goods. 

“Anerotic” Desire and “Inhuman” Love

“Our great temptation is ‘inhuman’ love, loving the finite for what it cannot be.” Williams, here, offers a theme that Augustine often dwells on. In the Confessions (4.7.12), Augustine reflects on the death of a dear friend and his process of coming to terms with the nature of this love in the face of profound loss: “Everything on which I set my gaze was death.” Nothing assuaged his torment. Everywhere he looked he was reminded of the absence of the one he had loved so dearly. Why did he feel this way? he wondered. Eventually, he realized that his grief had moved beyond simply mourning the loss of his friend: “I was so wretched that I felt a greater attachment to my life of misery than to my dead friend. Although I wanted it to be otherwise, I was more unwilling to give up my misery than him.” Williams writes, “In retrospect, [Augustine’s] judgement is that he had failed to love his friend humaniter, humanly; he had loved another mortal as though that human other were both immortal and the one necessary object that would complete his own selfhood. He had not taken in the finite otherness of his friend.” 

This understanding of the dangers of “inhuman” love is quite complex. Augustine famously makes a distinction between “use” and “enjoyment”—God alone is to be enjoyed, while all else is to be “used” to that ultimate end. Williams highlights the problematic potential of, and modern sensitivity to, the idea of “using” people for other ends, noting how “Kant’s exhortation to treat others as ends not means is deeply ingrained in the modern reader.” But what Augustine is getting at is quite different from what is generally meant by “using” a person. Instead of a selfish practice of vampiric abuse, or a subjugating use of power, Augustine is simply stating that a human is no final end, and to attempt to make a human being serve as an end is, in fact, to abuse them and oneself. For if we are attempting to find eternal satisfaction in the face of a human other, we are at once distancing them by idolization and making a demand on this other that they are ontologically unable to fulfill. Williams writes, “It is impossible to love the human other, just as it is impossible for me to love myself, without God being involved as the animating presence to which my subjectivity and the other’s subjectivity are always present.”

 “For Augustine, loving humans humaniter is loving them with regard to what they are signs of—infinite love,” writes Williams. In failing to do this we misjudge the nature and beauty of the finite otherness in one another’s humanity and paradoxically demand that it serve us in ways that will only bring misery and confusion. Williams continues, 

Our temptation is constantly to project on to the things and persons around us expectations they are unable to fulfil, and so to shrink both them and ourselves. We reduce the fathomless meaning of the other (fathomless because of its opening out on to God) to the dimensions of our own need; we enslave ourselves to objects of desire that pretend to a finality and all-embracingness that they cannot have. 

So, once again, the great paradox here is that in failing to properly “use” one another in this Augustinian sense—to see others also as contingent on something beyond ourselves—we make it impossible to love them rightly, and are tempted toward a pseudo-satisfaction, a reduction of our humanity that leads to a premature closure of our desiring nature—what Williams calls an “anerotic” end. 

Desiring Our “Creatureliness”

In our age where autonomy and freedom (at least a certain libertarian understanding of freedom) are so greatly prized, seeing ourselves as “contingent creatures” is not an easy sell. But at its core it is not an invitation to slavery or subjugation (in the way one might fear), but, surprisingly, to community and relationship. First, however, we must understand the context of our ontological contingency.

Williams writes, “Before we can rightly want God, we must know and want our wanting nature. To desire the creator, we must first desire to be creatures.” In reflecting on book 10 of Augustine’s De Trinitate, Williams notes the “potential strangeness” of the idea of suggesting that we love what we don’t yet know. As desirous beings, we impulsively want to grasp what we so desire. But this, according to Williams, is a key point of error. As God’s essence is ultimately ungraspable, our desire for mental apprehension must necessarily give way to trust. Likewise, Williams, echoing Augustine, clarifies that the quest for understanding oneself is not simply a matter of accumulating sufficient information but of understanding a condition. He writes, 

The paradoxes of self-knowledge—loving before we know, yet needing to know before we love, knowing completely that we have no complete knowledge—are meant to reinforce this upon us, to show us the impossibility of stating any theory of the self as determinate object. We are to know and love ourselves as questing, as seeking to love with something of God’s freedom (in the sense of a love not glued to specific objects of satisfaction) and seeking so to grasp this as our nature and our destiny.

Where does this leave us? It all seems very vague and incomplete. And that is, in a sense, precisely the point. Williams writes, “I do not know myself; but God knows me. God’s knowledge of me is available not as a picture I can grasp or as a piece of information, but in the form of trust in God’s love—faith, in other words.” And, as mentioned before, it is only God that can make sense of the “bizarre and ambiguous” in our lives. In this, we are freed from presenting ourselves as a completed “consumable” good, a “finished” self. In finding ourselves to be ontologically contingent creatures, we come to see that it is God who gives meaning to the meaningless in life. Yet interestingly, we find that this emerging narrative of contingency not only points us toward relation with God, but also toward relation with others. The very nature of our “incompleteness” is an indication that we ultimately belong to a “body” larger than our own. 

The Narrative of the Totus Christus

Since, as Williams suggests, we can only truly know ourselves by trusting in God’s love, we may wonder what is really meant by that phrase. Talk of “God’s love” can often be used to avoid specifics in hopes of being as ambiguously “inclusive” as possible, but Williams’s understanding of God’s love is particularized in the person and work of Christ. He writes, 

Independent of what the incarnation shows us of God, we could conceive God only as alienated from us and without self-relatedness; in the light of Christ incarnate, God’s apparent self-estrangement in accepting mortality becomes an assurance of, not a self-coincidence of plain identity but a self-relatedness within which we may find our own reality or truth as grounded in the threefold interaction of divine life that we call the Trinity. 

God’s trinitarian nature reveals that being is necessarily relational and the incarnation shows us just what it means to participate in that being. 

It is here that we find a shocking application of the “repudiation of our ‘finished’ self.” The path for a Christian to “self-discovery” is not in mental or spiritual ascent in the first. Instead, Williams, partially quoting Augustine, declares, “When you see God in Jesus, it is as if you see him at your feet, the suffering or dead body laid out before you; throw yourself down on to that level, ‘and when He rises, you will rise.’” This participatory descent is a submission to the helplessness of the tomb on Holy Saturday. The journey toward life for a Christian begins in death, the death of our assumed self-sufficiency, so that we might be raised to new life in the totus Christus, the whole body of Christ.

Williams writes that “to speak of God and the knowledge of God is always going to be in some way connected with narrative.” We are incapable of bestowing this narrative upon ourselves. Our narratives are not finally self-determined and are necessarily contingent whether we like to believe it or not. We did not choose when, where, or to whom we were born—and that is just day one. The question then becomes, what narrative will we find ourselves in? Williams writes, “If my identity is determined by the inaccessible but unfailing attention of God’s love, the incarnation of the divine Word in Jesus is a declaration that this divine attention is in touch with us and transforming us in a particular worldly series of events transmitted by human telling, active in the present through the historical body of the Church.” And this narrative is always related to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We learn to offer ourselves, through Christ, to God the Father, and in doing so are given to one another. As Augustine writes, “This is the sacrifice of Christians: although many, one body in Christ.”

In this incorporative understanding of the church, we can see also the fulfillment of the Law: love of God and one’s neighbor. Augustine writes, 

The parts of the body too, if they are beautiful even by themselves, are still much more beautiful in the total structure of the body. Thus the eye, for example causes pleasure and admiration; but still, if we saw one separate from the body, we would not call it as beautiful as we do when we observe it fitted into its proper place, in relation with the other parts, in the whole body. 

Our particular beauty and purpose is not lost in submitting to one another and to Christ; instead we offer it to a greater beauty that puts personal beauty and purpose in harmonic context. But before we again rush to a “premature closure” of our desiring selves we must look at the world of signs. 

Res and Signum

“God is res, and, in respect of him, all else is signum,” writes Williams. In the most basic sense, a signum is a sign and res is the thing signified, the true essence of what the sign points toward. This understanding comes to life, as related to this essay, in two specific ways: first in creation and second in the church. Creation is always in motion, in time, and, in its origin, ex nihilo. It is mutable and therefore no res in this ultimate sense. But that is not to say that it is not real or of consequence. Williams writes, “God alone is the end of desire; and that entails that there is no finality, no ‘closure,’ no settled or intrinsic meaning to the world that we inhabit.” Creation, like us, is contingent. But the great Christian mystery is not that the world is illusive and that we must escape it to find the “real,” but that God has made it a “world of signs.” Williams continues, “The Word’s taking of flesh . . . manifests the essential quality of the world itself as ‘sign’ or trace of its maker. It instructs us once and for all that we have our identity within the shifting, mobile realm of representation, non-finality, growing and learning, because it reveals what the spiritual eye ought to perceive generally—that the whole creation is uttered and ‘meant’ by God, and therefore has no meaning in itself.” Its meaning is continually uttered by God. 

In a similar way, the church is no final end. It is, in itself, no res. It derives its meaning from that of which it is a part. Williams writes, “There is one authorized ‘sign’ which for once we cannot mistake for anything but a sign. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus are res in the world’s history, yet they are signum . . . in what they point to. Here is a worldly res that cannot mislead us into thinking it is to be enjoyed in and as a purely worldly object.” Likewise, the church derives its substance not from what it is as an organization, or by its achievements, but exclusively by its contingency on its head, Christ. This is the core of the sacramental system that the church operates within; it is an active and creative contingency centered on the continued presence of the living Christ. 

This sacramental system is in many ways an education in our contingency and “non-finality.” In receiving Christ present in the Eucharist, we do not “consume” him as an object or possess him privately. Instead, the consumer becomes the consumed. We are made what we are by participation in the signs that God has offered to us, but the signs themselves are no ends. They point always beyond themselves to the “final non-representable end of desire.” For, as Williams writes, “Only God means nothing but God.”

The Ultimate “Other”

This process of exploring Williams’s interpretation of Augustine’s thoughts on desire has been a progressive stripping of intellectual ascent. We have moved from the myth of definite self-perception, to seeing ourselves as fallen, creaturely, contingent, incomplete, finite, obscure, and necessarily part of something larger than ourselves. But, paradoxically, the move from self-interpretation to a narrative of dependence on an “Other” has been shown to offer freedom from our tendency toward “premature completion” within ourselves and the vacuous consumption of the “finite otherness” in one another and in the whole created order. Williams writes that Augustine invites us to “turn from the world of external desirables towards the one truly desirable Other, God.”

This true, ultimate Other is what Williams calls the “non-existent Other”—“non-existent” in the sense that God is not a created thing at our disposal. God’s existence is not simply numerically, personally, or spatially other, but wholly and essentially other to us as creatures. This true “otherness” is presented as the cause and goal of our longing. But as it is never available to us to use—at least in the way that we, rightly or wrongly, use created “others”—it is therefore only ever ultimately present in a sort of “unusable” absence. But this ultimate res, as we explored earlier, has for our sake taken on the nature of a signum. And because of this great mystery we might now explore all of the created order as a “world of signs,” as Williams shows us. The key to the sacramental “world of signs,” though, is not a collection of “holy information” or esoteric knowledge, nor is it matter of simply performing the right rituals, as a way of theurgic divine manipulation. Instead, the way that we encounter the true other is purely on the terms of this other. And this we call grace. 

Williams writes, “As God in God’s own being has God’s own self as an object, so do we in finite measure. Grace both uncovers and satisfies the ‘drawn-ness’ towards God that is inbuilt in mind and sentience.” The freedom to enter into this true desire, a desire that is somehow without lack or satiety, is the invitation that we are given as those made in the image of God. Williams writes, “The image of God in human beings is thus the human being turned towards God, having God as object.” This grace makes it possible to turn toward God, to be caught up in the Son’s perfect adoration of the Father, and to learn to desire like God. Grace frees us from the tendency toward abusing “signs,” the misdirected instinct toward idolatry in all its forms. This is the freedom to let signs be signs, yet to discover grace mediated through them. Williams continues, “The work of grace is to make us dependent in the right way, dissatisfied with anything less than the horizon of God’s own selflessness and seeking to remain open to that selfless agency as it transforms our relation with the world and each other.”

Grace and Discontent

There is a somewhat surprisingly close relationship between an insistence on the necessity of divine grace and the modern experience of discontent. In their own ways, both admit to a certain impotence in the human capacity for self-determined happiness. Discontent might be described as a symptom of a disillusioned striving after something always seemingly out of reach, where an insistence on grace is instead a recognition of an ultimate incapacity in the human condition to be able to reach that “something” on one’s own. Part of the reason for spending time earlier on Augustine’s understanding of the fall, and his correlated theological anthropology, is to highlight how this understanding of an ontological desire is one of dependence instead of achievement. 

It is a popular sentiment to “look within” oneself in hopes of finding what one needs. In Augustine’s world, when we look within we instead find a glaring absence that points beyond self-sufficiency. Williams writes, “Our examination of the self as Christian believers is meant to bring us to the recognition that the inner life, instead of being a sanctuary of stability, is both profoundly mysterious to us and the locus of our deepest awareness of frustration. . . . Ultimately, for Augustine, the problem of self-knowledge is the problem of true conversion.” But the modern understanding of “conversion” is often that of being finished, finding that which one is looking for. There is always the temptation to that which Williams repeatedly warns of—that of “premature completion.” Williams writes, 

Conversion does not signify an end to the chaos of human experience, it does not make self-understanding easy or guarantee an ordered or intelligible life. What is changed in conversion is the set of determinates within which the spirit moves; and these may be as inaccessible to the mind as they were before. Thus the confidence of the believer never rests upon either his intellectual grasp or his intellectual control of his experience, but in the fidelity of the heart’s longing to what has been revealed as the only finally satisfying object of its desire. 

But once again we must clarify what is meant here by “object.” God, as no thing and uncontainable, is not “possessed” by us, but instead invites us to a certain “participation” in the divine life. Though we may not “use” God as something transitory, by grace we are united to God and, through Christ, may participate in the “divine use” of God’s very self—for in the Godhead “use” and “enjoyment” lose their distinction. And, in recognizing God as the true “object” of our desiring, we may see what Williams calls the “central and constitutive fact about human subjectivity—that it is oriented towards the endlessness of God.” This recognition of our need for God distinguishes grace from discontent. It is a severe mercy that gives us a blessed dissatisfaction in anything less than God himself. 

Endless Participation

The picture that Williams has put forth of desire, using the tools of an Augustinian ontology, turns out to be profoundly relevant in our times. In our age of prepackaged identities, meditation apps, and self-help e-books, there is a desire for a “quick fix” to our restless longing. And, as we noted, there are both secular and religious responses to the “problem” of desire. But, resisting this tendency, Williams reminds us of the wondrous strangeness of the God with whom Augustine converses in the Confessions—the God who alone makes sense out of our opaque lives, full of the “bizarre and ambiguous” as they are. 

Instead of participation in the divine life being a quantifiable “spiritual ascent” into enlightenment, we are paradoxically invited to “throw ourselves down” upon the mystery of the “dead Christ.” Instead of rushing by Good Friday to the resurrection, we are invited to identify with “God’s estrangement from God” in the tomb. Our participation is not first that of glory or illumination; instead it is an act of offering all the darkness and confusion of our lives to the Father, in union with the uncomfortable paradox of the “dead Christ,” the horror of the darkened tomb. Williams writes, 

Augustine, more clearly than many other early Christian writers, presents a vision of the entirety of human experience caught up into grace and into God, of providence at work in sin, doubt, confusion, complex and imperfect motivation. A human life is given its unity and intelligibility from outside. When God pulls taut the slack thread of desire, binding it to himself, the muddled and painful litter of experience is gathered together and given direction. 

Here, where the “boundaries between me and God in Christ have been obscured,” is where our true identity is to be found. Williams notes, “This does not flatly contradict the ‘Greek’ model [of ascent], but fleshes it out in a wider and darker human experience.” 

But darkness is not the last word. We have left the world of “quick fixes,” quantifiable “enlightenment,” and “finished selves.” But we have come to the light of the world, the brightness of which can’t but obscure our vision at first glance. Here we are given the “world of signs,” of sacramental hope. Here we learn to trust that our relationship of contingency is not finally with a slave driver or an angry master, as we may have feared, but with the one true sign, the love that created all and who fills all things. Williams writes,

God’s active love draws us across the distance between creator and creature: the process of that drawing is time itself, in which we learn and change. Because the gap between creator and creature cannot be conceptualized in any way that suggests ordinary difference or distance, we cannot ever be at rest within this temporal order, settling down with a clear map of where we are in relation to God. Our holiness begins with our acceptance of restlessness, not as a good in itself, and not as a frustrated shifting and turning and wishing for something better, simply the steady acceptance of incompletion and the radical nature of our desire for God’s endlessness.

For, ultimately, as Williams writes, “God asks not for heroes but for lovers.”

Jonathan Jameson successfully defended his thesis “The End of Desire: Sarah Coakley and Rowan Williams on Desire and Its Relation to God” in May 2019, and was awarded the degree of Master of Theological Studies cum laude at Nashotah House Theological Seminary. He is currently in the Master of Divinity program at Montreal Diocesan Theological College/McGill University, and is in the discernment process for the priesthood in The Episcopal Church through the Diocese of Central Florida. He has also been a full-time musician for the last eighteen years, and currently lives in Montreal with his wife and two children. 

This work previously appeared in the Anglican Theological Review under the title 'Erotic Absence and Sacramental Hope: Rowan Williams on Augustinian Desire' (volume 102, no. 4, Fall 2020), and is used here by permission of the Anglican Theological Review.

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Image: God creates Eve out of Adam’s Rib, Chartres Cathedral, Bay 44, Panel 15.